I bought this one a while ago and get excited every time I see an update. Keep up the great work!
thank you and for your support, will do
What I utterly love is the overall atmosphere. You have succeeded in making something in the exact vein of a 'lands of lore' like : nice, coherent and inspiring atmosphere. The artworks style is gorgeous and totally in the spirit of the golden days of eye of the beholder and co, where I dissected each cutscene image, each texture, to drink the artist mood and to feel the love and dediation put in it.
Keep up the good work, you have definetely holding some little gem here and I can't wait to enjoy the full game ! (BICEPS EMOJI)
On a side note, an information that you _may_ find interesting, but it's more a personal mindset (due to old age probably, no more time for grinding) : combat are boring AF for me. I almost considered refunding after spending one hour trying to passe the first mines and their poisoning plants and dying, dying, dying... (for the record : all the blobber of the 90's under the belt + Grimoire, not exactly a noob here). But whatever ! (NERD EMOJI)
I finally lauched cheat engine, boosted everyone and I'm stomping on everything - and believe it or not, even like that, it's sometimes tedious... :D BUT after that, I finally immensely loved the game for the aforementioned atmosphere and finely crafted locations.
Apart from that damn 'haaaeeellooooo' that are getting on my nerves.
Oh that's quite the compliment, I love every word of it
I do like building atmosphere and keep the immersion to certain heights, although I can do even better as the patterns and the whole technical part is getting improved every day and they're needed less and less, giving way to more content.
Although I do focus a lot on graphics, UI and all that, I know that clumsy controls can easily break the whole thing into pieces. At the same time, I really favor simplicity and taking a few steps back to simpler times, a time of huge buttons and less shit / text / math on screen.
Simplicity, atmosphere and grinding and getting more of it as you go, repetitively, is this game all about.
If you like what I wrote above, then you'll have no issues with the game in the long run.
It will be just more of the same, just with higher variance.
Yes, I understand about that _mindset_; This is why I am talking like that. This game is me, really. Its a game that I like to play.
Simplified, grind-based, without grand strategic plans or difficult choices or over the top twists and/or boring dialogues... There are tons of other games trying to innovate and do clever stuff...
I am not trying to innovate anything here. You'll get your towns, your items, your maps and their autotelic side stories and this gets repeated, all over.
I am ok if people get bored with my combat system lol, I have absolutely no problem with that... Its a simple system.
Yes, one might need to play with party creation and finding out that a higher power attribute really helps hitting these plants more easily, plus choosing a fitting race/profession.
The same with casting, choosing a low intelligence and you'll suck for a long time.
Its quite easy to create a party that sucks (for now at least, I plan prebuilt parties
).
Starting the game is hard, yes. You'll need frequent travel back and forth to refill / rest / get food, on early leves, for sure.
I understand completely your point of my combat, no worries at all. But I do like that combat really.
If you ask me, EOB and Lands of Lore had way more tedious battles and you could easily fake the whole thing, but I still love them by heart.
You were also waited there for a bit of time, hitting and missing, throwing stones and shit. My game doesn't really differs. Its just having a boatload more monsters, that is and you can alkso get overwhelmed the same.
In my opinion, just starting with a good enough party is all you need.
Well, if you liked curbstomping the whole lot of monsters, that's totally fine
But I am the guy that love to get better, little by little, point by point and defeat these monsters.
Too higher leveled monsters? no problem, let's try the other dungeon. This kind of guy.
But I feel that you could also do that after a while, after spending more time increasing stats and equiping characters with stuff... I found that a few of the players started beating a few monsters that I considered "impossible to beat" by early parties, so I know its quite viable.
Apart from that, the game wasn't really tested too much, so this is effectively my opinion.
So I assume that next patch would be content/campaign mostly, right? It seems like you have all systems ready, some of them are even polished.
My advise is not to focus that much on balancing or making everything perfect. Just look how MM7 was rough around edges but also how fun and successful it was at the same time.
Also, a fun 30-40 hours game is much better than boring 120 hours game.
So I assume that next patch would be content/campaign mostly, right? It seems like you have all systems ready, some of them are even polished.
My advise is not to focus that much on balancing or making everything perfect. Just look how MM7 was rough around edges but also how fun and successful it was at the same time.
Also, a fun 30-40 hours game is much better than boring 120 hours game.
A fun game with any number of hours is better than a boring game with many number of hours.
I'm just trying to get as many "math!" ratings as possible.
Yeah, the next patch will be mostly content and continued work on races / professions, fleshing them a lot more and completing them.
Not really focusing too much on balance though, nor perfecting things... The things I fixed were somewhat immersion-breaking (i.e. skill xp progression for instance, trainers etc.) and this was kinda a blocker for me..
I so much prefer to establish a number of working and addictive patterns for about everything and just build on that, repetitively, as it makes my work easier and allows fewer errors (similarly to programming and stuff).
Perfection takes quite the time and I find its not worth that time, anything "good enough" is good for for me until it isn't by the players to a degree.
For sure, I could easily create 20 maps of increasing difficulty in a night and call it a content, just to push a main goal of the game, no prob. However, I also know this would only make me sleep on it and cause me headaches in the end, as I don't like empty maps with monsters for the sake of duration.
I would love if the game ends up providing a constistent quality and atmosphere more than anything else. If it would last 40-50 hours in the end, so much the better.
Obviously, I am not 3DO or JVC lol, so I have to take a few shortcuts and make some difficult decisions in the end, but at the moment I just love the reactions and what I am getting for the game and I'll build on that
Thanks. I've played like just 20 minutes of EA 1.4 release, but I can imagine a complete run after it's released.
I have some initial feedback, though, but it might be difficult to implement all below.
-Correct me if I am wrong, but there's no active skills for melee/ranged classes? So all you can do with this glorious turn based combat is either hit, cast a spell or run (?). I can see this considered to be boring in a long run. It surely worked for MM6-8 with real time combat, but here it's a chore.
-Is there a thief class, or I missed something? How does looking for secrets works? Finding hidden items, etc?
-UI needs a bit more love - scrolling down during char creation just to see more than 5/6 classes or races is simply bad. The same with race/subrace description. You can use more space to present more information, you current approach is anachronism. Sorry!
-Leveling up is really boring - if you give a player nothing to increase manually or no new skill to select, you should at least put a notification on what has been automatically increased.
-Combat log - is there any?
-First map is just a small town, one chest and one combat encounter. Should have a bit more content, as it looks like unfinished vertical slice, not an introduction to the great journey.
-Looting items from chests is tedious, but I am sure you know that. Even a list of items with a 'take all' button would make it 100x better.
-Does monsters spawns some loot?
Hey no wories, I am always considering whatever feedback is in front of me.
However, mechanics and ways of playing that differ a lot or not backed by multiple players, can't really get into the game.
Depends on what you mean by active melee/ranged skills? I plan to add "feats", if that's what you mean, things that a character can do in battle and be tied with his race / profession, like for example "Rage" by Barbarian (as per D&D).
Other than that, indeed, nothing special. You hit or miss with melee and ranged, you hit or miss with spells.
More or less a turn-based battle version of Dungeon Master, Lands of Lore and EOB or something close to M&M, with a bit more variance when "Feats" gets implemented (later), and that's about it.
I try to avoid referring other titles and only referring the ones the game is inspired from, for obvious reasons.
I understand it might be boring for some players indeed, but not for others, including me and that's all it takes. I am a sucker for such simplified combat; I am actually get easily bored with the more complex systems and nothing like that will ever get implemented into "The Darkness Below".
Indeed, the UI can get better overtime, especially the "character generation", but I dare not touching that now with 2.5 months to the ETA. I wont problably touch one pixel of it, unless I feel I havey content to show. But I do agree, regardless.
Regarding the first village, I wanted to have a "peaceful" place for the party to start their journey. Although a few goblins made it to village, doesn't mean that I have. There will be tons of abominations all over the world for the party to enjoy, blessed by an Elder Evil. It doesn't really have to start with the first village. I just wanted for the party to feel "Silkmoor" like a base, a safe cozy place to come to rest their bones from the numerous cursed places around them. And frankly, I never liked that "New Sorpigal" was full of goblins here and there or it had these fire mages not 10 meters away, it felt a bit ridiculous, but thats my humble opinion, lol.
Yes, levening was even more boring before; with the new version (1.4), characters are now getting extra points on selected attributes, automatically, based on their race or subrace. No selection at all. I wanted to force that so "dwarves" look like dwarves in the long run, all having ridiculous toughness / hit points. I wanted to really tie race / subrace selection to skills, automatically. It doesn't sounds some cRPGish indeed but its a decision.
If you ask me, I also find the idea of selecting skills from a box, every level, just because. I want the players to feel a skill, train it, wear an armor to get trained on it and be responsible for their chosen race / subrace. I don't want a character to be "proficient" with anything just because he selected it. That was a major decision on game's design.
No combat log at the moment, but I have some feedback about that. I might implement a simplified log entry that shows more stuff and probably a few calculation along the way. Still, not of higher priority though but it lurks in my /todo so I'll get to it later.
Regarding chests, yes I have something in mind to increase the speed of getting items from chests but I like the way Lands of Lore did it, not rushing it. I'll consider a few ways though.
Monsters do spawn loot, specific items per variant. RULEBOOK.pdf has all that information on monster's chapter. Not, all monsters leave items though but all leave gold (automatically taken), which is the main way to get gold.
Well, quite the wall but hopefully answers a few questions above and shows what this game is all about, along with my intentions
